Alpha Just Dropped a Teaser—and Cannes Is Already Holding Its Breath
Neon just released a 30-second teaser for Alpha, Julia Ducournau’s third feature and—judging by this blink-and-flinch footage—her most emotionally loaded grenade yet. The film premieres tonight at the Cannes Film Festival, but cinephiles are already dissecting every frame like it’s a sacred relic from the Church of Cronenberg.
This is Ducournau’s first time back in the arena since Titane detonated the Palme d’Or in 2021, dividing audiences like a rusted scalpel. Now, she’s returned with Alpha, a grimy, 1980s-set coming-of-age nightmare featuring a 13-year-old girl, a single mother, and a tattoo that might as well be the Mark of the Beast.
What’s Really Going On? Or: Why a 30-Second Tease Feels Like a Full-Body Autopsy
You only need one detail to understand the stakes: Alpha opens with a child coming home from school with a fresh tattoo. Not a scraped knee. Not a detention slip. A tattoo. It’s the kind of inciting incident that practically screams, “buckle up, it gets worse.”
Ducournau’s choice to cast newcomer Mélissa Boros as Alpha, opposite the always-haunting Golshifteh Farahani (Paterson), signals a story rooted in feral intimacy. But here’s the kicker: the teaser doesn’t try to sell you the film. It dares you to survive it. There’s no exposition, no emotional soft landing—just cryptic flashes and a guttural line: “You don’t remember me?”
It’s giving Carrie by way of Tsai Ming-liang—if you swapped the buckets of blood for ink and mother-daughter silence.
Under the Skin: Ducournau’s Tattooed Psyche and the Curse of the Sophomore (Now Third) Slump
Let’s get brutally honest: following up Titane is like trying to scream louder than your own echo inside a metal coffin. The last time she touched cinema, she made people walk out, cry, laugh, vomit—and, crucially, think. Now, Alpha seems to pivot from the body horror of Raw and Titane toward something more haunted by memory than mutilation.
Or maybe not. Maybe the tattoo is just the start. Neon has wisely locked the rest of the plot in a vault. But knowing Ducournau, that ink could be a portal, a trauma marker, a symbol of inherited pain—or all three.
The teaser’s setting—a New York-inspired fever dream shot in Le Havre—evokes a gritty nostalgia more emotionally raw than visually slick. Think Kids meets Possession—if either of those films had the guts to center female rage without sanitizing it for the academy crowd.
The Tattoo Is Real. The Trauma’s Coming. Are You Ready for ‘Alpha’?
So here we are: a cryptic teaser, a Palme-winning director, and a Cannes premiere loaded with expectations. Alpha could be Ducournau’s The Piano moment—intimate, tragic, seething. Or it could implode under its own ink-stained ambitions.
Whatever the case, we’ll be watching. Closely. Maybe through our fingers.
Now you decide: Is Ducournau the voice of a genre revolution—or just trolling us with trauma?
